Recognising the Haves and Have-nots

A new study by Arianne Eason et al. aims to pin down when perceiving wealth begins to changes how we act towards others. Described recently in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, this North American team sought to understand whether infants are able to track differences in wealth, and whether they evaluate individuals based on that wealth. Though it may sound early, their findings suggest that children begin to differentiate others through markers of wealth at around 15 months of age.

In the team's first study, 17-month-old children watched two actors: one showed off a transparent bowl full of resources that would be of interest to a child (such as cookies, balls, and toys), while the other had a bowl that was nearly empty, containing only three such items. The actors then demonstrated that they each had a second, opaque bowl, from which they both pulled three rubber ducks, leaving the rest of the bowl's potential contents a mystery. The actors then left the room, abandoning their opaque bowls, at which point the infants indicated which they wanted.

Perceived wealth made a difference. Seventy two percent of the infants chose the rich actor's bowl compared to the poor actor's bowl. This preference echoed across two further studies: in the second study, 79% of infants chose to help build a tower with the rich actor, rather than the poor one, and in a third, 74% chose to play with the rich actor. This, the team believes, suggests not only that infants are able to differentiate between rich and poor people, but that that understanding of wealth can change their behaviour towards them.

Two further studies looked further at how infants evaluate rich and poor people. In these, 15-month-old children watched video trials in which one actor distributed more Lego or crackers than another. They were then shown the rich and poor actors' faces simultaneously, while listening to either positive or negative statements (e.g. "she's a bad girl" or "she did a good job").

When the infants heard positive statements, they spent around 59% of their time looking at the rich actor; a result that was not significantly different to chance, suggesting that they didn't feel particularly positive towards them. In the negative condition, however, they only spent 38% of their time looking at the wealthier actor, suggesting that the children more readily assigned negative statements to the poor actors.

When running these tests with younger children, the team found that 12-month-olds showed no preference for who to play with, and also found no association between positive or negative statements and rich or poor actors. This suggests that wealth-based biases seen in the slightly older infants are not yet present in 11- to 13-month-olds.

Overall, these findings seem to suggest that the ability to understand and respond to cues of wealth difference emerges at around 15 months, and that this social evaluation results in changes in social behaviour. Interestingly, this also included helping behaviours, which the team suggests, from an evolutionary perspective, may allow for better access to resources for survival.

Read the paper in full: 
Eason, A. E., Enright, E. A., Weng, S., Horton, R. O., Sitch, M. J., & Sommerville, J. A. (2024). The haves and have-nots: Infants use wealth to guide social behavior and evaluation. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 153(9), 2239–2257. https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0001567

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